The present invention relates to a method of and an apparatus for continuously producing a tube of indefinite length from synthetic resin and/or unvulcanized rubber incorporating a vulcanizing agent.
With conventional techniques, tubes are produced from synthetic resin and/or unvulcanized rubber incorporating a vulcanizing agent by a batchwise operation including two separate steps; the step of shaping a tubular body and the step of placing the tubular body into a vulcanizer and heating the tubular body for vulcanization. Accordingly, the operation is inefficient and involves difficulty in producing elongated tubes because the length of the tube to be produced is limited by the dimensions of the vulcanizer. Further when tubes are shaped from synthetic resin, the step of helically winding an extruded strip into a tubular body has the drawback that the adjacent superposed coils of the strip are not completely intimately fused and bonded to each other due to a reduction in temperature. Alternatively, when such strip is wound in layers into a tubular body, the adjacent layers are not always fully intimately fused and bonded to each other.
This invention has overcome such problems.